Dan Carpenter: Zimmerman's not the real trial

Jul. 15, 2013

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George Zimmerman, white Hispanic, is acquitted in the death of Trayvon Martin, black.

O.J. Simpson, black, is acquitted in the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, white.

Mike Tyson, black, is convicted of raping Desiree Washington, black.

What a mish-mash, these sensational criminal trials that supposedly put the entire nation in the dock for its commitment to racial justice.

Full of sound and fury, these media-saturated and media-fueled designated defining moments; and what do they signify?

If we say nothing, we dishonor the dead and dismiss anger and anguish that flow from wells deeper than the white majority has plumbed.

But to say any of these bizarre and terrible events was a test of access to equal treatment by African-Americans as a group is either foolish or demagogic.

Criminal trials are not U.S. Supreme Court deliberations on applications of the Constitution, or Congressional debates over civil rights. They are crap games in which one guy’s freedom rides on which of a thousand rolls of the dice makes boxcars with random lay people on a jury.

In the Simpson case, I am convinced, the jury was looking for a way to walk a glaringly guilty celebrity and got the right rolls from a high-priced obfuscating defense, a bumbling prosecution and a pushover judge. So be it. I accepted the verdict; and frankly, even as a card-carrying liberal, felt some disquiet over the ensuing civil suit, a legal end run to double jeopardy in my mind.

Likewise, the probable wrongful death suit and civil rights prosecution against Zimmerman may be perfectly proper; but rejecting the jury verdict as some racist conspiracy by the power structure is counterproductive to the larger cause of justice.

Chris Darden, the former black militant who helped prosecute Simpson, wrote afterward that he accepted an all-black jury because he was confident African-Americans would show their hard-earned sense of righteousness by stripping the hero’s garb from an evil man.

It didn’t work out. And when O.J. walked, nobody marched. Indeed, many celebrated. To these folks — and they were not necessarily representative of America’s diverse black population — the football and movie star symbolized the scariest thing to a racist system, the empowered black male.

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Tyson, for all his thuggish history, enjoyed the same partisanship when his word was pitted against that of an 18-year-old Miss Indiana Black Expo contestant who said the former heavyweight champion of the world had taken her by force.

Tyson supporters picketed, held a prayer service for him with prominent black preachers, and generally portrayed him as a modern-day — yes — Emmett Till, in the clutches of a redneck state. Louis Farrakhan got involved. Donald Trump, a pal of Tyson, actually offered to pay the city to drop the whole thing.

The jury believed the other black person. The woman from the local rape crisis center who monitored the trial was delighted. That made no sense to me either. I covered the trial, I was satisfied an abundantly fair hearing had been given, and any verdict was therefore acceptable. Huge heady issues of race and gender charged the air around here, but in my view that case did not advance us one inch toward resolving them.

Nor will this current trial of the two centuries.

Sick as I am over the snuffing of a young life and the idiocy of a pretend cop and the government that seems bent on making sure every idiot has a gun, I will defer to the six women on that jury and ask if anyone has a better way to peacefully sort out violent acts.

The jury did not carry the flag for American justice. It did not receive the revelation that seemed to come to millions of us as to what happened that fateful night. It deserves the benefit of reasonable doubt that it did its best at a thankless but noble job.

And guess what? Young black males would be in the same exact degree of danger today if George Zimmerman had been convicted.

Yes, America was on trial. Before, during, above and beyond State vs. Zimmerman. And the trial goes on for all of us, white, black, brown, red, yellow. Are we ready? It won’t be done in two weeks.